BRAHMS for Living Collections

The BRAHMS living collections module manages data and images for botanic gardens, arboreta and other horticultural projects. The module uses all the standard BRAHMS features to edit, query, report, map, export and publish online with additional features to manage garden accessions and plants. As living collections data are fully integrated within BRAHMS, it becomes possible to develop a comprehensive system for both curation and research.

Accession records include details of the type and amount of material received, from who or where, the original or derived source and initial identification.

Plant records hold details of plants in the garden from planting out to disposal or death.

Garden locations can be recorded from a defined garden area or theme zone down to pinpoint map location with options to record bed, grid numbering and map shape files.

Management events and observations for plants can be recorded. Examples are plant maintenance and stock-checks; name changes; observations on leaf flush, flowering, fruiting, disease and cause of death.

Management requests can be logged in the plant management and requests file with their ongoing status.

Manage incoming material, garden exchanges and other transaction categories as you define.

PDF files, Excel sheets and other documents can be linked to accession, individual plant, species and other records. Examples are material transfer documents and species level spreadsheets.

Images of plants in their original habitat or in the garden can be added, together with voucher images as available.

Projects can extend the standard BRAHMS data file structures by editing BRAHMS extension files which become a part of your database.

The Rapid Data Entry (RDE) module is used to capture new data or to transfer data from other formats such as Excel worksheets. RDE can also be used to batch upload stock-checks and plant observations for plant accessions.